


A Visit to Hell

by teamdiverseprotagonists



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Hell, References to Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-25
Updated: 2014-10-25
Packaged: 2018-02-22 14:49:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 357
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2511578
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/teamdiverseprotagonists/pseuds/teamdiverseprotagonists
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Even a demon can have a little humanity</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Visit to Hell

Hell is different for demons, after death. They can't leave, but they can't really be tortured, either. Every dimension has its own imprints of the past. For Earth, it's ghosts and spirits. For Heaven, it's resident angels, mingling with their brothers and sisters yet to feel the cold metal slide of an angel blade, but voices mute and gone. And for Hell, its the demons, trapped, but no longer expected to torture and scream. They simply....drift.

Or they're supposed to, anyway.

Being dead doesn't stop Ruby from being the best, being the exception.

The first few days, she waits. She flits between the racks, walking her fingers up the necks of the damned. She prowls behind the torturers, and whispers in their ears, stroking her nails down their backs as they brandish their knives, eyes wide. 

It's the new demons she has pity on. Despite what Sam Winchester may have eventually believed, she does remember her humanity- traces of it. She also remembers being strapped to the rack and screaming for all her rotten, useless lungs were worth. Her screams had echoed, she remembered. Hell had been a lot emptier then.

Torture, you could get used to, after long enough. But to be the torturer, to hear the screams, was a new torture, the kind that no one recovered from.

So she takes up their knives. She takes the souls turned demon, burnt to black but still screaming from the fire. Her soul has been ashes for centuries, black from the fire but no longer suffering the initial agony of burning. She can take the burden for a little while.

The demon souls surrender the knife willingly to her unseen hands, and curl up at the base of the rack, shaking. She does their job for as long as she can, trying to give them some reprise before their souls are seared to black again.

But she cannot do this forever. Eventually, she forces the blade back into their shaking hands, and leaves with her back strong and her head high. Behind her, she hears the screams resume, and wonders if this was crueler, after all.


End file.
